Alcohol Likely to Kill Kavanaugh Soon Enough

Brett Kavanaugh's petulant rich-boy performance before Congress, answering questions about his allegedly trying to rape a woman, may seem like a new low to many Americans. They have not studied history.

I quote at length from The Glory and the Dream by William Manchester (page 683). Entries in brackets are mine.

"The following month [December 1950] an incident at Washington's Sulgrave Club offered a sign of how far Lincoln's party had fallen. Leaving a dinner there on the eve of [columnist] Drew Pearson's fifty-third birthday, Senator [Richard] Nixon found a drunken Senator [Joe] McCarthy in the men's room, beating up Pearson. "This one's for you Dick," McCarthy jeered, belting the columnist in the face . . . Nixon stepped in and said "Let a Quaker step in and stop this fight." He took McCarthy's arm . . .

"After Pearson had gone, McCarthy confessed to Nixon that he couldn't remember where he had left his car. For a half-hour the two of them searched the area, the California Senator reading licence plates while the Wisconsin senator lurched after him in the dark. Nixon found it and McCarthy roared off."

Manchester does not say if McCarthy could remember the incident the next day. McCarthy was both a notorious drunk and a notorious liar, so any denial would have been hard to second guess. McCarthy is best known for taking the Red Scare to its height, accusing anyone who was not a Republican of being a Communist.

Brett Kavanaugh's defense plea, "Beer!" might seem cute if he had been in a bar fight, rather than molesting women.

However, there is hope. Since Supreme Court appointments are for life, someone Brett's age, 53, might be making rulings for a long time.

But no one has been taking alcoholism into account. Joseph McCarthy was 42 when the above incident took place. He died just 7 years later, in 1957, of liver damage from alcoholism.

True, modern medicine can keep an alcoholic alive longer. These days livers and kidneys can be replaced with donated organs. A pickled brain, however, cannot be fixed. I believe that is what we were seeing at the Senate hearing, a pickled brain in denial of its past acts.